# Heavy Rain Image Restoration: Integrating Physics Model and Conditional Adversarial Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05050 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05050/

## Key facts

- Cited by 157 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 157)

- [TransWeather: Transformer-based Restoration of Images Degraded by Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14813/) (2021)
- [Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14626/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation: Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08629/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09388/) (2023)
- [OneRestore: A Universal Restoration Framework for Composite Degradation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04621/) (2024)
- [Deep Dense Multi-scale Network for Snow Removal Using Semantic and Geometric Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11298/) (2021)
- [Restoring Images in Adverse Weather Conditions via Histogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10172/) (2024)
- [GridFormer: Residual Dense Transformer with Grid Structure for Image Restoration in Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17863/) (2023)
- [A Survey on All-in-One Image Restoration: Taxonomy, Evaluation and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15067/) (2024)
- [Towards Robust Rain Removal Against Adversarial Attacks: A Comprehensive Benchmark Analysis and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16931/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Day-Night Domain Adaptation with a Physics Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05137/) (2021)
- [WaveDM: Wavelet-Based Diffusion Models for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13819/) (2023)
- [Sparse Sampling Transformer with Uncertainty-Driven Ranking for Unified Removal of Raindrops and Rain Streaks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14153/) (2023)
- [Degradation-Aware Feature Perturbation for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12630/) (2025)
- [Toward Real-world Single Image Deraining: A New Benchmark and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05514/) (2022)
- [From Sky to the Ground: A Large-scale Benchmark and Simple Baseline Towards Real Rain Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03867/) (2023)
- [Closing the Loop: Joint Rain Generation and Removal via Disentangled Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13660/) (2021)
- [Language-driven All-in-one Adverse Weather Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01381/) (2023)
- [Towards Unified Deep Image Deraining: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03535/) (2023)
- [Not Just Streaks: Towards Ground Truth for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10779/) (2022)
- [PixWizard: Versatile Image-to-Image Visual Assistant with Open-Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15278/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Deraining: Where Contrastive Learning Meets Self-similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11509/) (2022)
- [CoMoGAN: continuous model-guided image-to-image translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06879/) (2021)
- [Visual-Instructed Degradation Diffusion for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16960/) (2025)
- [Dual Attention-in-Attention Model for Joint Rain Streak and Raindrop Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07051/) (2021)
- [Teaching Tailored to Talent: Adverse Weather Restoration via Prompt Pool and Depth-Anything Constraint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15739/) (2024)
- [MWFormer: Multi-Weather Image Restoration Using Degradation-Aware Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17226/) (2024)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12711/) (2025)
- [Uni-MoE-2.0-Omni: Scaling Language-Centric Omnimodal Large Model with Advanced MoE, Training and Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12609/) (2025)
- [Prior Knowledge Guided Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08877/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most deraining works focus on rain streaks removal but they cannot deal adequately with heavy rain images. In heavy rain, streaks are strongly visible, dense rain accumulation or rain veiling effect significantly washes out the image, further scenes are relatively more blurry, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel method to address these problems. We put forth a 2-stage network: a physics-based backbone followed by a depth-guided GAN refinement. The first stage estimates the rain streaks, the transmission, and the atmospheric light governed by the underlying physics. To tease out these components more reliably, a guided filtering framework is used to decompose the image into its low- and high-frequency components. This filtering is guided by a rain-free residue image --- its content is used to set the passbands for the two channels in a spatially-variant manner so that the background details do not get mixed up with the rain-streaks. For the second stage, the refinement stage, we put forth a depth-guided GAN to recover the background details failed to be retrieved by the first stage, as well as correcting artefacts introduced by that stage. We have evaluated our method against the state of the art methods. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms them on real rain image data, recovering visually clean images with good details.